The Devil's Masquerade Ball
by roisaber
Summary: Silent Hill draws in another victim, this time a Christian pastor. What's his dark secret? If he has any chance of finding redemption it won't come from religion, but from learning to accept himself and his sins.
1. The Descent

Pastor Chuck Wiles splashed cold water across his face in the grimy gas station bathroom. The water helped restore him to rudimentary awareness of his surroundings. He was exhausted after sixteen consecutive hours of driving, and he looked like Hell in a handbasket. His reddish brown hair was sweaty and mussed, and his sea blue eyes looked watery and bloodshot. His skin was pale and grimy. The bathroom he in was in no better shape; it was filthy, and urine-stained toilet paper was scattered across the floor. The smell of shit wafted from a trash can overflowing with paper towels. He wrinked his nose in disgust and left the bathroom without washing his hands. No doubt, the handle for the tap was more disgusting than his hands would ever be. He almost cursed but caught himself.

"Lord Jesus, please grant me the strength to make it to Charleston," he mumbled instead.

Pastor Wiles was on a tour of the South and was on a mission to preach at seven churches scattered across the region in seven days. He got out of the meet and greet in West Palm Beach late, and now the sky was at its very darkest. Wiles was on a mission to get his name out on the evangelical circuit, and hopefully boost his career by moving from his tiny 100 family church into something a little bigger. His wife… well, his wife was a big part of the problem. She wasn't satisfied with her husband's small town ambitions, and she believed she deserved a lifestyle more fitting for woman who'd graduated with honors from an Ivy League university. Marrying him had derailed her career, and she lived vicariously through his. Of late, the Mrs. Wiles had grown increasingly cold towards her magnanimously dull husband, and had been pushing him to further his career with increasing ferocity.

"All in the Lord's time," he'd tried to patiently explain to her.

No such luck. She was threatening to leave him if he couldn't give her a standard of living more in line with that of the high powered professionals in her graduating class.

So, here he was, in a gas station bathroom in the vilest hours of the morning, with piss-wet hands and a pounding headache. He climbed into his aging Jetta and eased it onto the rural West Virginia highway.

After a few minutes of driving the sullen sky gave way again, and heavy, ugly drops of water blatted mercilessly against his windshield. The wipers groaned and struggled to push them out of his field of vision. Chuck varied between singing himself hymns, repeating Psalms, and trying to keep his eyes on the increasingly muddy road. Finally, his GPS dinged and spoke aloud.

"In one mile," it announced in its stilted, robotic voice, "turn left, on Country Road 66."

Chuck eyed the machine uneasily. The route it suggested wound mercilessly through the hills. Still, even with a speed limit of 55, it would be faster than to follow the highway up through the hills to connect with the freeway after less than 50 miles. With an inward shrug, he turned left onto the unused route. He hadn't seen another vehicle in half an hour.

As roads were wont to do in the southern spur of the eastern ranges, the two lane roadway rose and fell; boiled and churned; and soon left him thoroughly disoriented. The route was thickly forested, and occasionally the highway flung off a spur of unpaved road that led to who-knows-what atavistic communities that had lived in those mountains essentially unchanged for a century or more. The rain continued to fall in heavy droplets that obscured his vision without quite managing to clean the grime and bugs off his windshield. Chuck traveled for another hour, and still didn't see a single other car. He felt like the only man in the world.

"Shit!" he suddenly cried, slamming on his brakes and sending the Jetta spinning end-over-end across the highway.

After a few sickening rotations, Chuck finally manhandled the car to a halt. His legs shook as he got out of the car to take a careful look at the sign blocking his path. The wording was unambiguous, and he swore again before immediately asking Jesus for forgiveness.

"Road Closed."

It didn't get much clearer than that, did it? The road was blocked off by three sawhorse barricades, dimly illuminated by the wan blinks of yellow diodes on top. Chuck sighed and considered his options. He'd driven down the Country Road for the better part of an hour, and it was only 10 miles before he'd hit the onramp for a main highway. He dug under the driver's seat of the Jetta until he found a flashlight, and he shone the beam onto the road beyond.

It wasn't hard to guess why the road was closed – the asphalt was torn to shreds, and it wasn't so much that the road had potholes; it seemed like the entire road _was_ one great pothole for as far as his flashlight could illuminate. Chuck started doing rapid calculations. It'd be brutal on his suspension to try to navigate the washed-out debris field, but at the same time, it would cost him two hours or more to go the long way around to the highway. He did what he usually did when confronted by a dilemma, and prayed.

"Lord Jesus, I'm cold and alone right now, and I feel like I'm praying in the wilderness. In front of me is a path that looks impossible, but I'll miss out on even two hours of sleep if I go back the way I came, and I won't get a wink of sleep before I have to preach tomorrow morning." He took a deep breath and thought of a scriptural reference that would fortify himself. "But of course, the Bible says that the path of the righteous is narrow and hard, and it's the easy road that leads to judgment. I think I'll take this hard road and entrust myself to your wisdom, oh Lord."

Satisfied, Pastor Wiles carefully moved the sawhorses out of the way and drove his car through the opening. A contentious man, he stopped and carefully replaced them exactly as he found them so as not to endanger other travelers on the dark, rotten road. With a deep breath, he eased the Jetta forward, trying not to wince each time it fell and rose over the great pits that marred the highway.

Going more than a few miles an hour would have certainly destroyed his car, so he carefully picked his way across the debris field without ever getting out of first gear. Rocks of asphalt pinged against the undercarriage of the car as the tires caught them and threw them upwards. Chuck didn't even want to think about what damage the hard gravel might be doing, and more than once a particularly large chunk of shattered road made a thumping noise that made his heart skip a beat. It was slow going, but he was soon almost a third of the way across the washed-out route.

When a red check oil light flared to life beneath his speedometer, Chuck noticed it immediately. His eyes darted to the engine's temperate gauge, which was much higher than normal and dangerously close to the red. Listening more carefully, he realized that some of the pinging coming from the car was not due to thrown rocks, but due to an overheating and underlubricated engine. One of the kicked up missiles must have severed the oil line. Chuck immediately killed the engine and let the car bounce to a halt. Considering the financial problems he already had, he could hardly afford to drive the Jetta until the engine blew itself out. He turned off the headlights to preserve the battery and took stock of the unhappy situation.

Without the Jetta's beams cutting into the forest, it was completely pitch black. Straining his ears, Chuck could hear nothing but the pinging of an engine giving up its heat to the night and his own strained, shallow breathing. With a wry smile, he realized that if nothing else, at least the rain had stopped. After a few more tired breaths, Chuck climbed out of the Jetta and shut its door behind him. The light of his flashlight illuminated dark trees with a blaze of focused light, but he could see nothing human apart from the wrecked highway beneath his feet.

Instinctively, Chuck knew that his phone would have no service, but he checked it anyway. Sure enough, he was nowhere near a tower that would communicate his microwave signal of distress to the outside world. There was nothing for it but to find the nearest country house and hope that he could explain his predicament before getting shot by a suspicious local. To his surprise, he discovered that as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see artificial light somewhere in the middle distance.

"It's either a mirage or a miracle," he suggested to himself bemusedly.

The pastor made his way towards the light, carefully stepping around ruined sections of road. He didn't bother putting the Jetta's hazards on; nobody could travel down the road fast enough to be surprised by the car parked diagonally across the highway. It took him ten minutes to make it close enough to identify the light, and he inwardly gave up on the idea of getting to the church in time to give services the next day. God works in mysterious ways.

The light was coming from a run-down garage, and Chuck was startled to find the door open and the sounds of tinkering coming from inside at this unholy hour of the morning. He stepped forward carefully, making a lot of noise so as not to startle the inhabitant. He kicked a few rocks for good measure. When he was close enough to be heard, the sound of metal tapping against metal stopped, and a young woman walked out of the garage wiping greasy hands on her overalls.

Chuck was stunned. Not only was she beautiful, but her appearance was downright uncanny. She looked like she could be a long lost twin sister of his, though he knew that wasn't possible. Like him, she had short red hair and blue eyes. Like him, she had fair skin, and stood a little shorter than average. The coincidence was so strange that he laughed out loud, while the woman looked back at him torn between amusement and suspicion.

"Hello, stranger," she hailed him warily. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"I can't believe there's a garage open on this road. How do you get customers?" He remembered his manners. "I apologize. My name is Pastor Chuck Wiles, of the Second Church of the Resurrection in Athens, Tennessee."

"Howdy, Pastor. I'd shake your hand, but as you can see…" she explained apologetically.

There was a brief, awkward pause, and then the woman spoke again. "My name's Melissa. What in God's name are you doing all the way out here?"

"My car broke down."

She snorted. "A closed highway is a strange place to have your car break down, if you ask me."

"Oh, well…" Chuck laughed self-consciously. "I thought it would be a shortcut."

"If I had a nickel for every idiot that said something like that, I could go to college instead of working at my pa's cockroach shack of a diner. Any idea what's wrong with it?"

"It was overheating and the check oil light came on."

"Look," Melissa said, wiping her hands on her overalls again. "I was just about to go to bed; I'm way too tired to do anything about your car tonight, and I'd need light to work anyway. Why don't you come inside and sleep in our spare room and I can go take a look at it first thing tomorrow morning?"

"I'd… hate to impose…" Chuck answered lamely.

"It'd be no imposition at all. That's the way we do things out here – neighborly, you know?"

"Well, thank you very much for your generosity. You're a regular Good Samaritan."

"West Virginia born and raised, you mean," the woman countered with ethnic pride.

Melissa led him inside the house.

"My pa's in town buying supplies, he probably won't be back until tomorrow or the next day. You can sleep in my little brother's room."

"Is he off at school or something?" asked Chuck.

Melissa was quiet for a minute.

"He died," she finally answered.

"I'm so sorry."

Melissa looked carefully into the pastor's eyes and then looked away. "Well, I firmly believe he's in a better place. I don't care what anybody else says."

"Let the little children come to me, and stop keeping them away, because the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to people like these," Chuck murmured.

Melissa looked back at him.

"The Bible's got a lot of comforting words in it, Preacher, but always remember this for me – use it as a salve for suffering souls, and never as a bludgeon."

Chuck was a little taken aback by the seriousness of her tone, but nodded obediently.

Melissa unlocked a door with a key taken from the doorframe, and led him into a small room that smelled like dust. She flipped on the switch and illuminated the room with thin light. It looked like a little boy's room you might see anywhere in America. There was a case full of trophies and pictures from a boy's little league team. One bookshelf was decorated with figurines of fighter jets and tanks. The books on the shelf were consistent with every small boy's interests – Robinson Crusoe, Tolkien, books about outer space and nature preserves.

"He was just a kid…" Melissa murmured, almost too quietly to hear.

Chuck stammered, "I couldn't possibly…"

"No, don't worry about it," she replied with sudden brightness. "It's just been awhile since I've been in this room. Look, we'd all rather it get used when it's needed instead of just sitting here as a monument to our loss. Sorry if it's a little dusty."

"Thank you."

The pair looked at each other for another long moment, blue eyes searching blue eyes. Finally, Melissa nodded once and quietly shut the door.

Chuck was so exhausted that he barely managed to get his shoes off before turning out the light and falling asleep in the dead boy's bed.

A tapping at the window woke Pastor Wiles up, and a surge of adrenaline shot through his body. He looked around wildly, with the contents of the strange room dimly illuminated by a light shining through the bedroom window. Where was he? What was going on? It took a few moments before the memories of the last night flooded into his mind. He'd been on the road all night, taken a detour, and then found himself stranded on an abandoned highway. A kind woman had taken him in. Reassured, he peered out of the window and towards the light. It was still entirely dark outside, which he found strange because it seemed to him as though he'd been sleeping for hours. A light like a flashlight bobbed cheerfully and shone into his window. Curious, Chuck tiptoed out of the house and out of the sliding glass door onto the house's rear porch.

"Hello?" he called out quietly. Then louder, "Hello? Who are you?"

There was a girlish giggle and then the light disappeared into the undergrowth of the forest with a loud crash.

"Hey, don't go into the woods all alone!" Chuck cried.

He was met by another giggle and the sound of someone forcing there way through the thick brush. He muttered to himself in dismay. Obviously, he had to keep the little girl from getting lost in the woods by herself. He ran back inside, grabbed his flashlight, and stumbled off into the woods after her. It was rough going, but it was easy to follow the path she'd taken. Branches were cracked in half; ferns were pushed down into the wet soil; and foot prints, size 4, led the way into the darkness ahead of him.

All at once Chuck stumbled into a clearing. He shone his flashlight around wildly, but saw no further signs of the path the girl had taken through the meadow. He came to a complete stop, opened his ears, and _listened_. At first all he could discern was the pounding of his heart and the quiet hiss of wind fluttering the branches of the trees at the edges of the clearing. But soon he heard something… else. An agonized groaning seemed to come from every direction and nowhere all at once. His flashlight caught something moving around in the shadows.

"Hey, you there! Who are you?" Chuck demanded, his voice quivering with growing fear.

Some_thing_ looked back up at him and its eyes glittered in the LED illumination. Chuck took an involuntary step backward – what he saw was the most hideous thing he'd ever seen. For all the world it reminded him of medieval drawings of demons, and the creature was grossly sexualized on top of its ghastly appearance. It was naked, and Chuck had to tear his eyes away from the creature's disordered genitalia. It was transgendered, and it had almost comically pendulous breasts but also a throbbing penis between its legs. Chuck let out a cry and raised his hands over his face despite the fact the creature was still a good twenty feet away. The pastor soon regained control of himself. He peered out between his fingers at the creature and was dismayed to find it slowly and carefully advancing on him.

"Get back! In the name of Jesus Christ, Lord of Hosts and savior of mankind, I command you to get back! Get back, Satan!" Chuck shouted, his voice echoing through the clearing and back into his own ears.

Even to himself, he sounded shrill and impotent.

The creature paused for a moment at his invocation, and then continued towards him with its sloping, hunchbacked gait. Chuck started frantically fumbling through the dirt at his feet for a weapon and came across a well-weighted rock. He switched his flashlight to his left hand; took careful aim at the demonic creature; and threw. He was gratified by the satisfying thud of hard stone connecting with soft flesh. The monster squawked and continued forward, bleeding out of an injury to its shoulder.

Chuck's legs were shaking so fiercely that he could barely remain on his feet. He grasped at the earth below him until he found something thick and metallic. He raised it, and discovered with a rapid glance that it was a heavy steel pipe of the kind used to transfer water or natural gas. It was just the right size and shape to be used as a club, and the pastor waved it threateningly at the approaching Thing.

"I said get back in the name of Jesus Christ! I'm not afraid to use this," Chuck huffed.

The creature appeared to be either dumb or without language, because it only made a cry like a strangled eagle and continued forward. Well, he'd tried negotiating, and he'd tried banishing it in the name of Christ; there was nothing else left but to fight it one on one. Chuck attacked first, bringing down the heavy steel pipe with a clang that took his breath away and almost dislocated his shoulder. How strong the Thing was! It brought a taloned hand rapidly towards his face, and he managed to block its strike only just in time using the pipe to parry. Chuck gave silent thanks that he'd taken fencing classes for exercising while seeking his diploma in theology.

Chuck took the initiative again, and used the sharp, broken tip of the pipe to stab at the creature's uncannily human face. The blow connected with a wet thunk, and the man put all his strength into driving it forward, deeper and deeper into the creature's face. It let out a surprised shriek and clawed helplessly at the steel. Chuck refused to let up, and the creature suddenly stumbled backwards and into the wet soil, unable to push the improvised weapon away from its vulnerable face. As soon as the Thing was down, Chuck brought the pipe across its body over and over again. When it finally stopped moving and he could hear nothing but the steady dribbling of blood, he finally brought his rain of blows to an end.

He panted hard and stared down at the monster. Unclothed and putrid, it resembled a two day old corpse more than a living, breathing human. The proportions were just right enough to be all wrong, and its strange between-gender heteromorphism made Chuck's skin crawl. He heard footsteps behind him, and he whirled around with the pipe in striking position, scanning for the new threat.

Instead, he found himself looking at a little girl. She was wearing a lacy black dress, and she looked for all the world as though she could have been Melissa's little sister. She had medium length auburn hair that ended in tangled ringlets, and her sharp blue eyes regarded him with something that resembled bemusement. Chuck panted heavily as he stared at her in shock.

The little girl spoke first. "Hey, mister, do you like my dress?"

"Who… who are you?" Chuck finally managed to ask in a strangled voice.

The girl cocked her head curiously.

"What, you mean you don't know? It's not funny to pretend to be a stranger." She searched his eyes relentlessly and Chuck found himself helpless to break her gaze. "Oh. Well, maybe this will help you remember."

The little girl rocked back and forth on her heels and sang in a lilting falsetto.

_The Queen had a daughter;_

_the Queen had a son._

_ The Prince and the Princess never knew fun._

_They studied the classics;_

_ They studied the lore –_

Here the girl stopped singing and broke into a giggle. Her singsong voice vanished and all that remained was a cold, bitterly ironic fugue.

"_One day the little Prince,_

_ killed the dumb whore_," she finally finished with a chilly smile.

"What?" Chuck stammered. "Look, it's time to get you home."

The little girl laughed again and then tore off into the woods. Chuck tried to give chase, but he was so exhausted that he managed to get only a few stumbling yards into the trees before forced to halt and double over, breathing erratically. When he finally got control of himself again, he found that the little girl's trail was impossible to find, and he heard nothing from her flight through the thick underbrush. Confused, tired, and defeated, Chuck slowly made his way back to the house where Melissa was presumably still sleeping. The unnerving rhyme echoed through his head the entire time, drawing out memories of …? He couldn't remember. And certainly the children's rhyme couldn't have ended with a gruesome act of fratricide. He stumbled into bed and knew nothing but unpleasant dreams until morning.

[AUTHOR:] So I've got ideas about where this is going, but... I'll continue this if I get enough hits/reviews that it makes it seem worth my while, or if I feel like it.


	2. The Sawmill

Pastor Wiles awoke in a sweat. The grey light of dawn peeked through the windows and tickled his eyelids until they sprang open of their own accord. He looked around the room he was in, suddenly panicking as the events of the previous night returned to the forefront of his mind. What had been that… terrible _Thing_? Who was the little girl who'd skipped off into the woods? He looked down at his unwashed hands, expecting to find them sticky with dried blood, but they were mysteriously immaculate. The pipe he'd dropped beside the bed was missing too, and there was no trace that anything from the night before had been anything but a bad dream. He stumbled out of the room in semi-shock, and went to Melissa's door and tapped on it. Nothing inside stirred, so he pounded on it harder. Finally, he heard the tell-tale tapping of padded feet on carpet, and Melissa opened her door wearing only panties and a white t shirt.

"What is it?" she asked blearily.

"I…" Suddenly Chuck felt extremely foolish. "I don't know. I think I had a bad dream, I guess. Lord that sounds stupid."

Melissa yawned and rubbed sleep out of her eyes. "Don't worry about it; waking up in a strange place can leave anyone disoriented. I'll get up - I promised I'd work on your car first thing this morning anyway."

Melissa led the way to the spartan kitchen. After a few minutes' fiddling in the pantries and fridge, she had big omelet cooking on a gas burner. Despite the tight panties clinging to her ass, Chuck didn't feel attracted to the woman at all. She was superficially attractive, that much was certain, but something about the casual way in which she hadn't so much as thrown on a bathrobe made him feel uncomfortable and alienated. It was strange to be in the presence of such a beautiful woman without feeling so much as a twinge of attraction. Upon further reflection, it was hard for the pastor to remember the last time a woman had aroused him in the least. Trying to get his mind off of things, he concentrated on the sizzle of breakfast. It smelled delicious and Chuck said as much.

"Oh, well, my pa's gone so often that I had to learn to take care of myself or I'd end up eating nothing but cereal and frozen waffles for half of my days," Melissa replied with a grin. "Anyway, tell me about your dream."

In slow, halting tones, Chuck recounted his memories of chasing the little girl through the woods and fighting against a monster in the clearing. Melissa listened carefully while wolfing down her half of the omelet, occasionally nodding or adding commentary of her own.

"Well," she finally said, "They say this town was built on an old Indian graveyard or something like that. I guess preachers aren't usually the superstitious types, but it might not do you wrong to sleep with a dreamcatcher over your bed next time."

"I think I'll just double my prayer time," Chuck replied wanly.

Conversing with Melissa made him feel a little better, but there was still something weighing down his gut that wasn't the omelet. The whole thing had _seemed so real_, so real that he was more terrified by the absence of evidence than he would have been by proof that it had happened. It was like discovering that the floor was just a hologram by getting out of your chair and unexpectedly falling through it.

"I'll go take a look at your car now, okay?"

"Should I come with you?"

Melissa shook her head. "I might need extra gear from the garage, so why don't you stay here so you can bring it out to me if I forget anything? Here."

She tossed him a walkie talkie, which he barely managed to catch before it hit the kitchen's dirty tile floor.

"What's this for?"

"Cell phones don't work out here," Melissa answered with a shrug. "That's the only way I'll be able to get ahold of you if I need anything."

Chuck nodded and clipped the radio to his belt.

"I'll be on Channel 6. Don't forget it," Melissa said.

"Channel 6 it is."

Melissa skipped off to change, while Chuck returned to the room he'd been given. No matter how he tried to sit down or lie, he still couldn't get comfortable. A growing sense of unease in the back of Chuck's mind tugged at him relentlessly and suggested that he was missing something important. Finally, he couldn't resist the impulse any longer, and after checking to ensure that Melissa almost out of sight as she headed up the highway he opened the closet and carefully rummaged through it. There was a toy box full of stuffed animals, and some of them struck him as being just a little girly for a boy who was a star player on his Little League team. There were slot car race tracks and board games. An old NES was collecting dust alongside a half dozen game carts at the bottom o the closet. Finally, he found the thing he hadn't realized he'd been looking for – it was the boy's diary. He tried to open it, but it was locked with a strong metal clasp that didn't budge at all when he tried to force it.

"It's locked," he said to himself out loud.

He tucked the diary into his back pocket and the tingling sense of unease finally went away. Suddenly, the walkie talkie at his belt let out a sudden burst of static. Chuck thumbed the talk button.

"Hello? Melissa? Are you alright?"

There was still nothing but grating, uneven static. Chuck tried the other channels and got nothing but the same sound. He turned it back to Channel 6 for just long enough to hear the little girl from the night before giggle, and then there was nothing but more static.

"Melissa?" he asked earnestly.

The radio answered with nothing but electronic noise. Genuinely worried for Melissa's safety, he left the house and searched the garage for a weapon. He found an old bolt action .22 caliber varmint rifle hanging on a gun rack on the south wall. The pastor grabbed that and a handful of ammunition before heading up the road towards his stricken car. Finally the static on the radio dimmed down and died. Chuck didn't know what he expected, but a sinking feeling in his gut told him to expect the worst.

By day, he realized that the garage was actually on the western edge of a very small town by the name of Sykes, population 50. There was a small diner, a strip mall, a clinic, and a few dozen houses, but that seemed to be about it for the tiny municipality. Chuck felt extremely self-conscious with a rifle strapped to his back, but he didn't see anyone else on the streets. In fact, he started to suspect that everything in the town was abandoned, a view that he quickly confirmed before heading further along the highway. Everything in the diner was faded and dirty, and he could spy a thick layer of dust on all the tables through the thick layer of grime on the window. The other buildings fared no better. A closed-down strip mall contained an electronics store, a book shop, a large souvenir store that sold the kind of tchotchkes and moderately useful junk that one might forget while packing for a camping trip, and, gallingly, a store selling porno. Chuck made a face and moved on. At the end of one cult-a-sac was a small Christian chapel, of the Baptist denomination.

It took him the better part of half an hour to make it to his car. What he saw there chilled his blood. The hood was open and the hazards were on – obviously Melissa had started working on it. But her backpack was upturned and all of her tools strewn across the road, and to his horror, there was a large splatter of blood all over everything. He let out an involuntary keen and then looked around in a panic. He unslung the borrowed rifle and pointed it wildly at nothing.

"Melissa! Melissa!" he cried as loud as he could make his voice. "Are you okay? Melissa!"

No response.

Chuck tentatively searched the area, and found a few drops of blood creating a trail leading to a spur leading off the highway and into the trees. The road was marked by a sign that read, "Robertson Sawmill." The pastor carefully advanced up the broken asphalt, occasionally spinning around on his heels to make sure that he wasn't being stalked from behind. He kept his rifle at the ready. With the safety off and the hammer cocked, it was ready to fire the moment he pulled the trigger. Every now and then, he saw a few drops of blood coagulating on the pavement, providing him with a grim trail to follow. The grey light of morning seemed as though it was coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

He finally came out through a copse of trees and found the sawmill standing before him in all its dilapidated glory. The mill had obviously been out of commission for decades; part of the building's roof was caved in, and the paint was so faded he could barely make out that the wood had once been dark red. Chuck carefully crept up the parking lot towards the building, scanning everything with his eyes as fast as he could make them focus. He knew that whoever had taken Melissa could be watching him from inside the building. He took long, deep breaths, trying to coax his heart into serenity. Finally the pastor gathered enough courage to slowly open the door into the sawmill's abandoned front office. It was empty inside, but the trail of blood continued on, deeper into the building.

The plant looked like it had stopped operations right in the middle of the workday. A huge log hung overhead on stained steel chains, gently swaying with the breeze that caused the building to groan and shift. Chuck had to steady himself to keep his own groans from adding to the quiet din. The air inside was cool against his skin, and smelled like rotten wood and old dust, with the faint addition of distant, coppery blood.

"Melissa?" he hissed into the walkie talkie, trying to keep his voice as quiet as possible.

There was still no answer, not even the grating static from earlier. It was easy to follow the occasional blood drops on the floor in the light spilling through the sawmill's window. The blood mixed with the dust and wood slivers to make dark clumps that filled him with unease. When a raven suddenly let out a loud caw from somewhere in the building, it startled Chuck so much that he almost pissed his pants. The blood led him to a locked door in the back of the building, sealed with some kind of primitive electronic lock and heavy bolts that wouldn't have looked out of place in a bank vault. There was a keypad next to the door, but without power, it would be useless even if he somehow managed to discover the PIN.

For a bitter, craven minute, Chuck considered just abandoning Melissa and running away. This wasn't his town, these weren't his people, he shouldn't be here and this had nothing to do with him. It was only a 10 mile walk from Melissa's garage to the main freeway, and from there he could hitchhike into a city and get his wife to rescue him with a phone call. No one would ever have to know that he'd been to Sykes, West Virginia, and nobody would blame him for the crime. But he soon abandoned that train of thought. First, it was his Christian duty to try to rescue someone in trouble, and the thought of just turning tail and running filled him with shame. Besides, his fingerprints were probably all over Melissa's house, and he'd be the first and most obvious suspect if he couldn't rescue her from her captor. He took a deep breath and considered the door carefully.

He needed to do two things to get through – to turn the power back on in order to activate the electronic locks, and to find the PIN that would command them to open to him. He decided to make a careful search of the sawmill until he found a generator or fuse box that would return power to the facility. It was slow going – he feared that he could be attacked at any moment, and he carefully covered every corner with the barrel of his rifle before turning. He followed the east wall, and then the north wall, navigating huge pieces of deactivated milling equipment and employee lockers. It was almost as if the Rapture had struck – in one case, he found a half-eaten mill rotting next to a lunch pail, and a hardhat on the ground right in front of it. All the hair on his arms was standing on end.

After half an hour of careful searching he finally found the generator room. Chuck rolled up his sleeves and got to work, but the machine resisted him at every step. First, there was no fuel in the tank, and he had to grab a can of half-denatured gasoline and carefully funnel it inside. Then the engine refused to turn over, and it took a couple well-timed thumps before the generator would finally maintain its ignition. Most of the building's lights came on, and with a grating, rumbling moan, all the equipment started to engage.

"Well, whoever the kidnapper is, he knows I'm here now…" Chuck muttered to himself.

The walk back towards the vault door was even more dangerous and terrifying than the original infiltration had been. The clatter of the reactivated sawmill could probably be heard for half a mile, and there was no chance he'd get the drop on the kidnapper now. Not only that, but with the machinery pumping, grinding, pulping, and constantly on the move, he had to constantly watch his head to keep it from getting taken off by some sudden movement of logs along the rails. Between dodging the huge cores of denuded trees, he had to keep his rifle trained on every direction at once. His auburn hair was matted with sweat and he could feel drops of it sliding down his neck and staining the collar of his shirt.

"Lord Jesus, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Lord Jesus, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Lord Jesus, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," Chuck chanted like a mantra.

Once again his walkie talkie started spitting static. Chuck wildly thumbed at it with his left hand while keeping the rifle up with his right.

"Hello? Melissa? Melissa if you can hear me, _please_ answer!" he hissed into the mic.

The static only grew louder, and Chuck felt something approaching from over his left shoulder. Carefully, taking no sudden movements, he put the walkie talkie back on his belt and turned with his rifle at the ready.

The Thing was back. No, wait – that wasn't right. This was a different Thing, though one just as horrid. Superficially, it had the appearance of a young boy, wearing a bloodstained Little League uniform with a baseball cap. But where its eyes should have been there were only black, crying voids, and its right arm was grotesquely disproportioned and muscular. Chuck took a step backwards and heard a loud buzzing at his ear. It took him a moment to realize how close he'd come close to backing right into a huge circular saw mercilessly chewing through a giant pinewood log. He reluctantly raised his rifle. Could he really bring himself to shoot a… but was it really a child?  
"Stop! Stop or I'll shoot," Chuck threatened with a quailing voice.

The boy… thing… paused only long enough to vomit before advancing again. Something ugly started ringing in the back of Chuck's mind, but he couldn't place the feeling at all. It was almost like déjà vu, but there was no conceivable way that he'd ever seen anything like the horror in front of his eyes. He gestured with the rifle, still unwilling to pull the trigger. The creature was getting close now, and Chuck's eyes widened as he realized the muscles in the huge, disfigured arm were tensing up to swing.

"Please stop!" Chuck cried, trying to blink involuntary tears out of his eyes.

The Thing didn't offer any acknowledgement, and finally Chuck squeezed his eyes shut and fired. The shot pinged against a huge pulping machine and bounced off, and Chuck finally forced himself to look just before the boy took a swing at him. The pastor threw himself to the ground without a moment's hesitation, and the awful boy's arm slammed into a wood chipper, crushing it as though it'd been struck by speeding sixteen wheeler. Now in absolute terror for his life, Chuck fired again and again, as fast as he could pull the trigger. One by one brass cartridges were ejected out of the bolt of the rifle, and one of them hit his arm on the way down, causing a livid, rectangular burn. Little flecks of unexploded gunpowder gritted up his eyes but Chuck kept firing without a pausing for breath. Five shots, ten shots… finally the trigger clicked as he tried to fire bullets that weren't there.

The boy had half a dozen holes in his uniform, and with a slightly startled look, crashed to the ground beneath him. Chuck didn't know whether to try to offer help or to run, but before he could decide, the body started to boil away into crimson, gelatinous ooze. Within thirty seconds, there was nothing left but an ugly, discolored stain on the floor where the boy had been. Chuck's chest was heaving so hard that every breath was an agonizing gasp. Finally, he got a hold on himself, and continued on towards the electronic door. At least his walkie talkie finally stopped spitting static at him.

At the door, he noticed something he hadn't seen the first time due to the dim lighting. Someone had written a password hint just above the keypad, and with a quick swipe of his sleeve, Chuck managed to make the writing legible.

_The PIN is the month and day of your birthday, stupid_, the writing informed him.

"My birthday... well, obviously not _my_ birthday," Chuck realized with dejection.

Still, on a whim and with no better leads, Chuck typed 12/24 into the keypad. To his utter astonishment, the door let out a groan and then opened itself inward.

"What the Hell? I mean…" Chuck was at a loss.

What were the fucking chances that the mystery writer would have the same birthday as Chuck? With quaking hands, the pastor reloaded his rifle before going inside the locked room.

He fumbled for a switch on the walls, and the fluorescent lighting flared to life after a few aborted, clicking tries. Chuck's heart skipped a beat when he saw what the room contained. Someone had obviously been tortured there. There was a chair like a dentist's chair, with manacles for someone's hands and legs. It was covered with the dark brown blotches of dried blood, and there were implements of evil scattered across a table nearby. Thick black flies buzzed and swarmed everywhere, and the room stank overpoweringly of blood. Little white maggots feasted on the infernal banquet of spilled viscera. On one wall, Chuck saw a series of pictures tacked to a posterboard. His heart pounded relentlessly in his chest as he walked forward to take a look at them.

They all depicted the same thing.

They all depicted the same horrible thing.

They all depicted the little girl he'd met the night before, in various states of undress and agony.

Chuck wanted to turn away – he was desperate to tear his eyes away, but he found he couldn't. His body wouldn't obey him as he looked from one awful picture to the other. In this one, her dress was partially torn at the chest, exposing the pert left breast of a young lady just getting through the first phase of puberty. In the next photo, the same breast was slick with blood, and an unidentified hand was halfway through sawing off her left ear with a hacksaw. The pictures only got worse from there. In one, the girl was naked and obviously writhing in unspeakable agony as a shadowy figure violated her – in every sense of the word - with a corded power drill. Chuck gagged on his own vomit, and his throat burned with acid as he looked at the last photo in the series. Someone had taken a selfie with her corpse. The girl was unmistakably dead – her chest had been split open and the place where her heart should be was a gaping and empty abyss. As for the perpetrator – as for the monster, the unspeakably wicked demon that did it to her – well, whoever it was had scratched the portion of the photo that bore his face until it was unrecognizable. The Polaroid was a scratchy white mess where his picture should have been.

"Damn it!" Chuck punched the wall with tears streaming down his cheeks. "God fucking damn it! What the fucking Hell? My God, what is this Hell?"

Eventually he got control of himself, and pointedly turned his back to the board full of awful photographs. He searched the rest of the room for signs of Melissa and found nothing. Disheartened and defeated, the pastor made his way out of the squealing sawmill. The light was still relentlessly grey, and the grim pall hanging in the overcast sky reflected the despair in his heart. He stood in front of the sawmill and stared into nothing for what seemed like a very long time.

"Hey, Chuck. Don't look so down." The voice was familiar.

Chuck turned around with teary eyes.

"Impossible," he said flatly. "You're dead. I saw the pictures. You're _dead_!"

The little girl shrugged. She was wearing a fresh outfit, and now she was the very picture of an all-American teenager. She wore a short jean skirt, and her white tank top looked like it had been padded just a little to give her the appearance of a maturity that was still a couple years in her future. There wasn't so much as a scratch on her. The only thing out of place – and this was the thing that drove his horror to blistering new heights – was the hat on her head. It looked like a Spirit Hood but it was all wrong. Instead of being something cute like a fox or a wolf or a panda, this one looked like a grim parody of one of the Things that had been harassing him ever since his car had broken down in Sykes. The monster hoodie was mottled with colorful bruises and browned with puddles of dried, fake blood. The girl's auburn hair spilled out from underneath the front of the cap, and she brushed it out of her face to confront him with sharp blue eyes. The girl didn't seem bothered at all, but Chuck found his shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

"You still don't get what's going on, do you?" the girl asked, seemingly without rancor. "Geeze, do I have to spell _everything_ out for you? Have you guessed my name yet?"

Chuck had to force his words through a mouth filled with ashes. "No. Please, what's going on… do you know what's happening here?"

The girl let out an exaggerated sigh. She tossed something small and shiny to him, which he fumbled and had to lean over to pick up. It was a key.

"That'll open every door in the strip mall you saw on the way here," she explained. "I'll bet if you can find the key to unlock the diary you stole, that'll answer a lot of your questions. I'm going now."

She turned to leave, and Chuck tried to chase after her.

"Wait! Do you know Melissa!? Is she alright?"

The girl turned to face him once more.

"I've probably interfered too much already – this is something you have to do for yourself. We'll probably meet again though!"

"Wait… please don't go!"

It was too late. She jumped off of a ten foot embankment. Chuck ran to the edge and looked for her in every direction, but it seemed that she'd already disappeared into the thick woods that butted against the sawmill parking lot. Chuck stood alone in total distress for a few minutes. What was going on? Who was that girl, and how had she survived such lethal tortures? Where was Melissa? Finally, he took a long, deep breath and looked at the key the girl had tossed him. Sure enough, it was a thick silver key with the word "Landlord" pressed into its surface. Alone, confused, and terrified out of his wits, Chuck saw no alternative but to follow the girl's advice and look for the key that would unlock the diary secreted into his back pocket.


	3. The Strip Mall

The strip mall was deceptively nondescript. Chuck stood and stared at it, trying to build enough courage to go in.

The day had given way to evening, and the pastor took a long swig out of a water bottle he borrowed from Melissa's house. Her father still hadn't returned, and three thorough searches of the house had turned up nothing in the way of explanation for where the woman had disappeared to. No one answered when he tried to hail her on the radio. The photographs from the walls of the sawmill continued to buzz around in his head no matter how hard he tried to forget them. The girl had been dead. _Dead_. No one could survive such gristly injuries. And yet, she'd met him with cheerful dismissal right afterwards – perhaps she had a twin sister?

Of course, the little girl hadn't turned up in any of the pictures on Melissa's wall.

Of course, Melissa's father hadn't, either.

Chuck rubbed his goose-pimpled arms. It was getting chilly. The sun was just below the horizon, and the sky was illuminated with greys and blues and golds and purples as the zodiacal light gave way to nighttime.

"I'd better check this out before nightfall… and try to get back to Melissa's house before it gets dark," Chuck announced aloud to no one.

He was lonely in the abandoned town. Even the ungentle company of his wife would have been preferable to the unremitting silence, broken only by the occasional crowing of a bird or gust of wind to stir the trees. Chuck decided to enter the bookstore first; it seemed like the least intimidating option. Maybe he could find a Bible there for good luck if nothing else. The master key turned easily in the lock, and the pastor quietly let himself inside.

The lights didn't respond when he flipped the switch so Chuck studied the scene with his flashlight. The first thing that struck him was that this was obviously no ordinary bookstore. There were too many types of incense for sale; too many candles in all the wrong shapes; too many herbs, semiprecious gems, and tarot decks for sale. Usually small town America went for traditional denominations of Christianity, and the more orthodox the better, but Sykes obviously must have possessed a more off-beat disposition like that of Santa Cruz or Cassadaga. There was an open book on an altar towards the middle of the store, and Chuck made his way to it curiously.

There was no one around to complain, so Chuck read aloud, a habit that drove his wife crazy. He flipped through the foreword and acknowledgements and found the first page of text.

"It came to pass, when Jesus had risen from the dead, that he passed eleven years discoursing with his disciples, and instructing them only – wait, that's not right." Chuck furrowed his brow. "Jesus only taught for _forty days_. What is this?"

Something was wrong. The book had a leather jacket, thick pages, and all the gravitas of a Holy Bible, but the words inside were totally foreign to him. He was no intellectual slouch and had memorized huge passages of the Bible, and read the whole thing from cover to cover several times in the course of his education. Whatever he was reading obviously wasn't the Bible as he knew it. Chuck flipped to a random page in the book.

"Jesus continued again in the discourse and said unto his disciples, 'It came to pass then, when Pistis Sophia' – Who? '…had uttered the seventh repentance in the chaos, that the commandment through the First Mystery had not come to me to save her and lead her up out of the chaos. Nevertheless of myself out of compassion and without commandment I led her to a somewhat spacious region in the chaos. And when the material emanations of the Self-willed had noticed that she had been led to a somewhat spacious region in the chaos, they ceased a little to oppress her, for they thought that she would be led up out of the chaos altogether."

Chuck blinked and closed the book. Such a book was not just blasphemous but utterly bizarre; it interpolated nonsense into the Greatest Story Ever Told. Chuck continued examining the contents of the bookstore.

One shelf was entirely devoted to medieval alchemy. The Book of Lambspring, the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, and the assorted works of Paracelsus all stood proudly with their covers facing the waning light. There were grimories, too – for instance, the Lemegeton, allegedly the work of King Solomon. Stand-alone pamphlets such as a translation of the Tabula Smaragdina were available with commentary for ninety nine cents. Chuck started to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and shifted on his feet to try to catch his bearings. Damn it, there were even Bibles in the place – in English, German, Koine – as if the heretics could somehow redeem their blasphemies by placing them in proximity to the work of almighty God! With great distaste, Chuck searched the rest of the store for the key to the diary, and came up entirely blank. He was finally relieved to leave the library of unrighteousness at his back.

Next was the electronics store. The handle of the door was rusted shut and opened only with extreme protest. All of the equipment inside was almost as old as Methuselah; here an 8-track player, there a ZIP drive. Chuck felt a smile tug at the edge of his lips. The place was practically a museum of obsolete technology. He bumped against a table and received a nasty shock when the record player on top suddenly came to life. The voice on the record was that of the little girl, singing in her lilting, enervating falsetto.

_The Prince had a chalice,_

_ The Prince had a knife,_

_ The Prince stabbed the girl then sealed away her life._

_ His friend saw the violence._

_ His friend saw his crime._

_ The Prince knew he'd hang thence forth in his own time._

_ Afraid of his passions,_

_ Afraid of his heart,_

_ The Prince killed his friend too and fled for distant parts._

The needle caught on a scratch and jumped, and then started playing the same verse over and over.

_…stabbed the girl then…_

_ …stabbed the girl then…_

_ …stabbed the girl then…_

_ …stabbed the girl then…_

With a shudder, Chuck reached down and turned off the record player.

There was little else in the store worthy of note. Chuck tried to rifle through everything; he even opened up the cash register, which proved to be empty. He took another look at the lock on the little boy's diary. It was a small thing, and the metal was unbelievably strong for its size and weight. He tried to force it again, this time with a screwdriver he found in the back room, but it didn't budge even when he tried to lever it with a mallet.

"It must be titanium, or something…" Chuck mumbled to himself dejectedly.

Where could the damn thing be? Well, that was the problem, wasn't it? It could be anywhere. The opening to the lock was quite small and it was hard to imagine a key more than a couple inches long might fit into it. Something that small could be hiding absolutely anywhere. In a sudden fit of rage, Chuck threw the screwdriver at an old CRT TV, cracking the glass but doing nothing to satisfy him.

"Damn it!" he cried out loud. "Lord, what do you _want_ from me? What is this stupid, terrifying, _stupid_ fucking trial? Why are you doing this to me, God? I never did anything in my life but try to be the best man I could be and serve you! I even became a pastor for you! I gave up _everything_ for you, and you just leave me all alone in this fucking nightmare without so much as a sign?"

Chuck was breathing hard, and his words came out strangled.

"_Why_? I don't understand it; really I don't. I put Satan behind me by fleeing from all my old friends, who were sinners. I went to Seminary instead of studying geology! I married Carmen instead of –"

Chuck took a heaving, confused gasp.

"Instead of…."

He couldn't remember.

"Instead of…"

"Instead of what?"

The pastor's head buzzed mercilessly, and he clawed at his own temples as an intense migraine erupted behind his eyes. The dim evening light in the shop grew mercilessly painful, so he shut off his flashlight, fell to his knees, and cried for a long time.

When he finally regained his bearings, it was almost entirely nightfall. The cry had purged much of his anger and fear, and he was grimly determined to go on, even without being able to make any sense of what was happening to him. He let himself out of the electronics store and stared up at the sign to the last shop. He trained his flashlight on it to read it in the brown light of dusk.

"Pleasure Alley. Clothes, games, and accessories. Well, they certainly didn't make a virtue of subtlety," Chuck observed with a wry smirk.

The key slid into the lock easily, but no matter which way he jiggled the handle it seemed impossible to get the damn thing to turn. He was just about to give up when something inside finally caught and allowed the lock to click open. The door opened with a long, moaning squeak, and Chuck nervously scanned the room with his flashlight.

It was as decadent as he ever could have imagined in his most profane nightmares. Colorful dildos covered most of one wall, and there was a big saddle with a fake dick sticking out of the top - Chuck didn't dare speculate how it was used. Aisle after aisle of VHS tapes advertised the most grotesque perversions – urination, masturbation, and group sex. There were riding crops for sale. There were cat'o'nine tails for sale – what did people do with _those_? Of course, every imaginable career was corrupted by a sexualized outfit. Sexy firefighter, sexy nurse, sexy policeman, and even sexy cat. Chuck stood bolt upright for a minute, taking it all in, unable to proceed until he'd gotten his fill.

The place made his ears burn with shame. There were images of naked women everywhere he shined his flashlight. Sex, and the female body, disgusted him. Everything about it made him wince with instinctual revulsion. Its wetnesses. Its pungent odors. Its bulbous protrusions. On the rare occasions when he actually felt the need to perform his martial duty with Carmen, it was his tendency to lie back and think of England while his wife jammed herself on his rod for a few fruitless, pointless minutes, before they both gave up and lay far apart from one another. And in this store he was confronted by row after row of shameless females photographed in the most revolting poses of animal perversion. Spread legs and glistening vaginas greeted no matter where he looked. Women held open their labia to expose the rotten pink flesh within. Chuck almost gagged.

His flashlight settled on another aisle of VHS boxes, this one towards the back. His heart skipped a beat when he realized what he was looking at. Gay porn. It was homosexual porn, right there in the open where anyone who entered could find it! To what depths would Babylon not sink? Chuck's breath shortened and something in his belly got tighter as he scanned the titles. Backdoor Bromance. Butt Bandits. Buttfuck Stallions 8. And that was just the B's! The pastor tried as hard as he could to push it out of his mind, to look somewhere, anywhere else. With a surge of inexpressible revulsion, Chuck realized that he was growing an erection.

"**No**! Lord Jesus, please help me find that key and _get out of here_!"

Chuck threw himself through the door to the back office so quickly that he didn't realize it actually opened to a set of stairs leading into the basement, so when he broke through he ended up tumbling face first down the stairs, trying to break his fall with his arms. The door at the top of the stairwell shut with a click. Chuck thumped into the bottom of the stairway, bruised, shaken, but otherwise unhurt, just as there was a loud crash coming from the door he'd come through. He tentatively picked himself up and made his way to the top of the stairs, only to discover that the door was not only locked, but also obviously blocked by something he'd tipped over on his way through.

"Well, shit," he said, surprising even himself.

What else was there to do? Chuck went back downstairs and entered the building's underbelly. Behind the doorway at the bottom of the stairwell was, to his confusion, another stairwell. Another door at the bottom. It seemed to be getting darker and darker. Chuck nervously made his way down, checking each step with his foot before putting his weight on it. Something ghastly and wrong was going on, and he couldn't for the life of him guess what it was. His erection died down and left the head of his penis jammed awkwardly into the zipper of his slacks, forcing him to reach down and manually readjust to keep it from chaffing. What he discovered at the bottom of the stairway stymied him. There was another door which opened into another stair. Was this the same one? No, it couldn't be – this one was certainly darker than the last. Chuck decided to try a little experiment and went back to the top before continuing onward.

Naturally, the door at the top of the second staircase was locked.

"What is going _on_ here?" Chuck demanded.

But he was only answered by the dying echoes of his own voice.

Chuck half-ran downwards, now, slamming open one door after another as he continued to descend the same stairwell over and over. Each time he moved onto the next one, the single fluorescent bulb providing light to the scene grew a little darker. He didn't know how long it took, but after what seemed like an eternity of running, the lightbulb flickered and died. Chuck stood, heaving, surrounded by uttermost blackness. His flashlight chose that moment to die and none of his ministrations was able to coax it back to life. With a sudden, agonized cry, Chuck threw himself down the next set of stairs, opened the next door, and then felt his stomach give way as he free-fell into blackness.

It was hard to guess how long Chuck was unconscious.

It could have been no more than half an hour.

It could have been an eternity.

When Chuck finally came to, he found himself in a small room illuminated by ruddy ochre light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once. The floor was grating, but he could make out nothing below him except the sound of running water someplace far off below. The pastor groaned and got to his feet, and took uneasy stock of his surroundings. It looked like a construction site. Old canvas, stained with what he hoped was just water, was tacked up all over the walls. Chuck was relieved to discover that his rifle seemed to have survived the fall as well, and he gingerly slung it across his shoulder. A short search of the small room managed to uncover his flashlight.

It had clattered under a small gurney, and the shock of the fall must have gotten the wiring back into place because it was illuminating the sheet it fell under with a thick white circle of light. Chuck grabbed it gratefully and then tested the door of the room. It opened with a slowly, grinding against the grated floor. Chuck exited into a narrow hallway. There were a few doors, and a staircase leading back upward. Naturally, the trapdoor leading back to the surface was locked and didn't give way when he pushed. Chuck snorted. That was just the way, after all.

"Well, I guess I have to find another fucking key."

To Chuck's horror, something seemed to answer with a squeak. He quickly unslung the rifle and scanned the hallway around him. There was definitely something tapping against the floor, and he could hear scores of pointy talons clattering against the grate floor. It was coming from behind one of the doors. The only prospect that scared Chuck more than coming face to face with a nightmare was leaving one at his back, so he slowly, carefully, tentatively turned the knob and pushed open the door nearest the stairwell. All at once, something came thundering out.

At first it seemed almost amusing. There were four or five of the Things, clambering over one another and generally heading in his direction. They looked like they might be Dachshunds; they were long, thin, and walked on stubby little legs. But it didn't take more than a second for it to become apparent that the creatures were something much more horrifying than Dachshunds. They had one big eye on their foreheads, and their slavering mouths were full of several rows of sharp, needle-like teeth. They had rubbery pale skin and something heavy and sagging at their backs. In fact, on closer look, they looked like – well, they looked like… they looked like…

"They look like fucking dicks!" Chuck involuntarily shouted aloud, drawing a bead with his rifle.

They were definitely closing in on him and Chuck didn't have time to think. He squeezed the trigger again and again, and the bark of gunfire echoed painfully in the narrow corridor. The Things screeched and yelped and tried to get away from the flashing muzzle of the rifle; three of them were obviously wounded, and fell to the ground with several holes bleeding into a collective puddle. Another one was wounded but still trying to flank him warily, while the last stared at him dead-on with its single blue eye.

"Go to Hell!" Chuck cried, but the rifle was empty.

The gun didn't use magazines, and Chuck knew he didn't have time to re-fill the stock manually. Instead, he charged straight forward, swinging the stock of the gun like a club. The hot barrel burned his hands but Chuck didn't pay any attention to the pain, focusing all his will on beating the life out of the Thing before it could approach him. He felt a sharp, red pain in his thigh, and he realized that the one flanking him had managed to get a good grip on him. He smashed at its skull with the flashlight in his left hand, while trying to hold the other one at bay with the makeshift club in his right.

The Thing biting his thigh finally lost its grip, and Chuck kicked it to the side as hard as he could while he faced down the stunned creature in front of him. It was lying on its side – easy pickings. Chuck brought the stock of the rifle down on its belly so hard that it split open, spilling ichor, viscera, and a small, shiny thing all over the canvas covering the floor. Without a moment's hesitation the pastor whirled to face the remaining foe but he needn't have bothered – its skull was crushed and it slunk off into a corner and waited to die. He panted for a few minutes, paying as close attention to his senses as he could and reaffirming that the threat had been neutralized. When he finally caught his breath, he shined his flashlight down at the shiny thing from earlier. It was a key.

Chuck wiped the bloody thing off on his shirt, staining it further, and took a careful look at it. It obviously wasn't the key for the little boy's diary, but it just might be the right size for the trapdoor blocking the stairwell. Chuck continued to breathe and listen while slowly refilling the rifle, fitting one bullet after another into its long tube. When he was finally ready, he tried the key and the trapdoor obediently opened.

The great room awaiting him above could have been something like a museum, but it was a museum that would have defaced Hell. There were many grotesque and unidentifiable Things kept pinned underneath glass and labelled with plaques in some abominable tongue. Great steam machines drove pistons that drove gears that didn't seem to drive anything at all, but merely added to the hideous cacophony of noise and violence that filled the great, open gallery. A particularly agonized screech drew Chuck's attention upward, where he saw a still-living horse slowly hacked in half with a bandsaw held by two demons, working in tandem to sever muscle and bone. Blood fell to the ground and into sluices worked into the floor, sucked up for some unknowable, unspeakable horror somewhere far below. Chuck watched with revolted awe as the pair worked the saw all the way through the poor equine's muscular torso. After they'd cut the first horse entirely in half, great chains rattled and pulled the next braying horse into a stockade between them, while sucking the two halves of the first horse into some smirking, crunching netherworld.

Chuck couldn't resist the urge to vomit and he fell to his knees, spewing chunks of half-digested food that quickly fell into the sluices and were drawn away with the rest of the ichor raining down. Chuck didn't know which way to turn, he was surrounded to all sides and above by one unspeakable atrocity after the next. This wasn't Hell. This was worse than Hell. This was a blasphemy beyond even Lucifer's vilest ambitions. He knew from his earliest childhood teachings that the Devil came to the faithful in the form of an Angel of Light. What demon of inequity could this museum of abominations possibly glorify?

Everywhere he turned to look, some new horror assaulted his senses. A great projector screen displayed a stop motion film of a woman being raped and murdered, over and over again. White phosphorous fell on little demonic babies and burned their heads out into a hollow cavity before they fell to the floor, too far gone to even feel torment. Amongst all the horrors, Chuck finally caught sight of a wrought-iron stairwell leading up from the middle of the gallery; it went straight up and out through the ceiling. The pastor made his way forward, stepping carefully so as not to slip on the floor that was slick with wet blood. The sawing continued. A fresh horse screamed in agony. Strange midgets drove their mutilated penises into one another's misplaced holes. Chuck gagged and continued onward, thankful that the Things seemed too absorbed in their own depravities to even notice him. He finally made his way to the staircase, and then he slowly, carefully, step by step climbed upwards and out of the madness. As soon as he made it to the top, he slammed the trap door behind him closed and fell face first to the floor, breathing heavily. It took him a long time to gather enough presence of mind to examine the room he found himself in.

The first thing he finally noticed was that it was blessedly silent, as though protected by soundproofing beyond anything known to man. Second, there was a thin shaft of moonlight peering through a hole in the ceiling, illuminating an alabaster altar with a velvet cushion placed on top of it. For a very long time, Chuck sat with his head in his hands, sobbing, until he finally got enough strength to pull himself back to his feet. When he felt a small hand suddenly place itself on his shoulder, Chuck started so hard that he almost passed out from the sudden change in blood pressure. He slowly and deliberately turned around.

"You're a mess," the little girl informed him dispassionately.

Chuck saw red, and hissed, "You again!"

She was wearing an outfit that Chuck vaguely recognized as animesque. She looked like she could have been a girl from that children's show – was it called Sailor Moon? Her dress was white and blue and she held a wand with a large glowing crystal on top. Her tangled auburn hair was brushed straight, and Chuck might have mistaken it for a Halloween costume, but it didn't have a chintzy, store-bought appearance. It must have been bespoke stitched. Somehow, even over the scent of the blood that stained his clothing and slowly dried in his hair, he could smell the faint floral scent of a young lady wearing too much cheap perfume. Chuck almost laughed, but the feeling he felt wasn't relief.

"What's going on?" Chuck demanded, the fun-and-games gone from his voice.

The girl just shrugged. "Why don't you check the pillow?"

The pastor was furious, but there was nothing to do but follow the girl's instruction after having come this far. It was obvious that his life was in her hands. Whatever she willed would happen to him. When he reached and looked at the purple velvet his suspicions were confirmed. Sure enough, there was a little brass key sitting on top of the pillow. Chuck grabbed and pocketed it with a snarl, and whirled to face his tormentor.

Of course, she was gone.

The door at the top of the staircase opened without a fuss, and disgorged Chuck out into a cold, moonlit night. Grim with resolve, Chuck slowly picked his way through the broken highway back to Melissa's house to read the diary.

He was going to end this.


	4. The Diary

When Pastor Wiles got back to Melissa's house, he banged on the door for several minutes before letting himself inside. The door was unlocked, and the house was empty. There was no sign of Melissa, or the return of her father either. With a sigh, Chuck flipped on the lights. Nothing happened. He cursed under his breath and went to look for the breaker.

The house was somehow in much worse shape than when he'd left it. Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust, a seeming impossibility given that Chuck had only been gone for most of a day. Everything just looked more grungy in general. The silverware was tarnished. Little flecks of paint were peeling off the walls. Everything looked a little more sun-bleached and washed out under the beam of the pastor's flashlight. Chuck eventually found the breaker box behind a bookcase, but despite flipping all the switches several times, he couldn't get the power to come back on. Finally he sat down at the kitchen table and set the flashlight to illuminate him from a nearby counter. He took out the small diary and regarded it uneasily.

What had motivated Chuck to take it? That was the first question he couldn't seem to answer to his own satisfaction. It was as though it had called to him of its own volition, even though that was obviously impossible. What was the deal with that horrifying museum inexplicably situated below a non-descript strip mall in the middle of nowhere? That was a patent absurdity. A bead of sweat percolated through Chuck's forehead as he considered the problem more carefully. Could he be dreaming? It was inconceivable that any of this should be _real_, right? Maybe he was dead. But if he was dead, Jesus should have come to bear his soul away to its eternal reward instead of… instead of… all this.

Finally Chuck gave up on his ruminations. There was nothing he could do to solve the problem with reason, and where reason failed faith would have to prevail. The key to the diary turned easily in its lock, and the weighty metal hinge sprang open so fast it startled him. With a grim smile on his face Chuck began to read.

_August 23_

_ Hello Diary! My name is Matthew Davis, but you can call me Matt. My therapist said that I should get a diary to record my thoughts and so that I'd always have someone to talk to. I hope you'll be my friend._

_ The house is a mess and dad and mom are screaming at each other. We were supposed to move out yesterday, but we didn't get everything on the truck in time and we're stuck in an almost empty house for an extra day. We ordered pizza for dinner, which was great. My dad thinks that if we move that the kids will treat me better but my mom thinks it would be better to stay. Dad won and I'm going to a new school soon._

_August 25_

_ Hey Diary. Oops, I totally lost you during the move. My bad, I hope you forgive me. I start 6__th__ grade at Oak Hill Elementary tomorrow._

_August 26_

_ Hello. Today was pretty difficult. First I was almost late to the bus because the directions mom gave me were wrong, and then I ended up being late to class because I couldn't find the classroom in before the second bell. So of course everyone was staring and gossiping about me when I finally came in the door. Ms. Belcher seems nice, but 6__th__ grade seems like it'll be a lot more strict than 5__th__. I already feel like I'm behind on my work and it's only the first day._

_ I ate lunch alone today. I guess that's okay. It's better than what happened at my last school._

Chuck paused in his reading and let thoughts percolate up in his mind.

"Oak Hill Elementary… that sounds familiar, actually. Wait a minute, isn't that where _I_ went to school?" Chuck had to think hard – two decades of life stood between him and the quiescent memories. "Yes, I'm pretty sure it was. I don't remember any Matthew Davis though…"

There was nothing else for it; Chuck kept reading.

_August 27_

_ Went and saw my new therapist today. Everything is so new to me that I didn't have much to talk about. I didn't like him though. I guess mom told him about my little problem and he just kept coming around to the same thing over and over again. I know I'm not _supposed_ to feel things like that, but what am I supposed to do about it? One minute everyone is telling me to be myself and the next minute they're telling me I have to be somebody else instead. Do adults even realize what they sound like?_

_August 29_

_ A kid hit me with a pog from a rubber band today. I guess it's normal to get teased as a new kid. I hope that's all it is. I know that mom and dad moved to get me away from my old school, and I don't want to put them through all that again._

_August 30_

_ The weekend! Finally! I spent most of the day playing video games in my room which is so much better than going to school. Mom tried to get me out of the house but since I don't have any friends yet, where would I go? And she really doesn't want me running around in the woods on my own. So it was easy to get out of it. My guild made mad gold today and I bought a new epic mount. So cool._

_ I do hope I meet some friends._

_September 1_

_ I got sent to the office today. We were supposed to write a short story for English class about what we did over the summer. I didn't want to tell my teacher about the problems so instead I wrote a story about a dinosaur who stomped all over the school. They called my parents and I got grounded, plus they told my therapist about it too. I don't see what the big deal is. Ms. Belcher barely reads these anyway._

_September 6_

_ Sorry about not checking in for awhile. My parents wanted me to take my diary to the therapist but I didn't want to. Why should I let him see you? All he does the whole session is talk about my problem. I told my parents I didn't want to see him anymore, or at least see someone else, but they seem to think it's all part of the process and that the therapist is right about everything._

_September 8_

_ Our new church is stupid too. It's the same boring stories over and over again. If I hear about Noah's Ark one more time I think I'm going to scream. And as usual, they said that God did it all because of my problem._

_ Would God really drown little babies because of something like that? Is it really that bad of a crime?_

_September 9_

_ Finally a friend! His name's Chuck, and he-_

Chuck put down the diary and rubbed his eyes. Could he have _known_ this boy? Wait – the timing didn't make sense. Chuck was older than Melissa, and while she'd said that his room had been kept empty for a long time, it couldn't possibly mean… Chuck breathed a sigh of relief. It obviously couldn't be the same person; he'd never lived in or even heard of Sykes, West Virginia before.

_- and he tripped a bully who was making fun of me and sent him sprawling on his face in front of the whole cafeteria. We talked all lunch and I learned a lot about him. Plus, he had a really awesome button shirt on instead of dressing in dumb band t shirts like everybody else. I'm going over to his house after school tomorrow. It should be a lot of fun._

_September 10_

_ What a busy day! So much happened in class. We saw a movie about rocket ships and learned about all the planets. Did you know that Neptune is really bright blue? How crazy is that. It's because of some gas – nitrogen I think it was the same as in the sky. But that wasn't the best part._

_ I went to Chuck's house and ate dinner with his family. You should see his room, his parents must be rich. He had all he video game consoles plus shelves full of books on every wall. He seems like he knows everything about everything I've never met anybody more smart. He wouldn't play as anyone other than Amy in Soul Calibur and he wrecked me almost every match no matter who I picked. We had fried fish for dinner._

_ His parents seemed nice but a little distant. They also wouldn't let us spend time alone with Chuck's door closed. I wonder if they talked to my parents before letting me come over. I don't know why my parents have to tell _everyone_ in the world about it. Why can't I have a boy friend without everyone trying to get involved. I guess they'd say it was for my own good but they say that about a lot of things, like that therapist._

Chuck was becoming increasingly uncertain, and actively dug into his childhood memories, trying to remember. He _had_ had a pretty good childhood as these things went. All the latest games, new shoes whenever he needed them – his parents would get him almost anything he wanted just as long as he kept his grades up; did his chores; and didn't stay out after curfew. But he couldn't remember anybody named Matthew Davis. Of course, he could hardly remember anything else from that time either, to be honest. Oh sure, he could the time he got suspended for what he did when his class was dissecting frogs. Sarah Mc… Sarah McSomething, his first crush. But if he was really the Chuck the diary referenced, shouldn't he remember someone that seemed like a very good friend during 5th grade? There was nothing to do but read on.

_September 11_

_ Chuck and I ate lunch again today. Not much else happened. It seems like the bullies stay away from him for the most part. I wonder how he does it._

_September 12_

_ Today the therapist massaged my shoulders and that made me really uncomfortable. I wish he wouldn't touch me at all._

_September 14_

_ The bullies followed us almost all the way to Chuck's house on the way home from school today. I don't know who told, but they were yelling "Faggots!" and "Queers!" at us. I don't understand why everyone can't just leave me alone about it. I know that the Bible says it's wrong, but that doesn't make any sense to me. The Bible says a lot of stupid things nobody follows anymore anyway. I'll bet the bullies were wearing clothes woven of multiple fabrics or whatever and the Bible says _that's _wrong too._

_ I tried to give Chuck a hug when I left, but his parents pulled him away with a scowl._

_ Am I going to be treated this way my whole life because of something that happened a year ago?_

Chuck discovered that the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. There was no denying the faint bells starting to ring in the back of his mind. Whether he could fully remember or not, he knew somewhere deep in his gut that this was a _true story_, that this wasn't some random fiction and that he'd found this diary for a reason.

He also knew in his gut that the story wouldn't end well.

Chuck wiped sweat off his forehead and kept reading.

_September 18_

_ Sarah McInnis asked me if I was really gay and if that's why I spend so much time hanging around with Chuck. I told her that she could kiss me on the lips and find out. She just slapped me instead. And my parents wonder why I don't like girls._

Bells were definitely starting to ring in the back of Chuck's mind.

_September 19_

_ Today was the _best day ever_. Well, I had to go to school, and that was stupid. But my parents set my curfew to really late since it's Friday, so Chuck and I took our bikes and went down a random dirt road and found a totally abandoned shack. It was so cool! First, there were half full cans of paint everywhere, so we went around painting logs on the property and writing our names on stuff. There were a few bottles of liquor that still had a little bit left in them and we both tried it, ugh whiskey is so gross. Why do adults act like it's the tastiest thing in the world it's like drinking dirt that hurts your throat too. We also found a box of porno mags under a really gross bed._

_ It's the first time I've seen a real grown up woman naked and it was super gross. They were all hairy and their vaginas look like some kind of weird animal. If God made people like this, he has a pretty strange sense of humor that isn't very funny. The magazine was full of men putting their penises inside with a look on their face like it hurts._

_ You couldn't pay me enough to do something that gross. And ugh – that's where I _came from_? My _parents_ do that? Just ugh._

_ I'm going to start a new diary, a diary I don't mind showing my parents or my therapist. That means my real feelings will just be between me and you, my real diary._

Chuck's brain seemed like it was coming to a slow boil, and each little bubble that freed itself and travelled up to the surface released a new memory. He_ had_ done something like that when he was a kid. He remembered trying a sip from a dried out whiskey bottle and he did remember finding a bunch of pornography in an old shack somewhere. But the face to Matthew's name continued to elude him. Maybe there had been someone else there on his adventure, maybe there hadn't been. The only evidence he had was the diary in his hands; his memories just weren't working right.

_September 24_

_ Sorry for taking so long to write, Diary. I do most of my writing in the other diary so I have something to show my therapist and parents when they ask. If you don't mind, I'll talk to you when I have something _really_ important to tell you. I hope you won't get lonely. Sometimes I wonder if maybe you're really another little boy in a different world, and my words magically appear in your book whenever I write them in mine. If that's true, I hope you can find a way to write back!_

_September 29_

_ I kissed Chuck today._

The diary seemed to leap out of Chuck's hands of its own accord, and he violently slid his chair back and bashed the back of his head against Melissa's refrigerator. _What? Actually __**what**_? How could anything like that have possibly happened!? And how could he have possibly have forgotten if it had? He noticed the rest of the kitchen for the first time in awhile. Things seemed to be degrading faster than was physically possible. Plaster had fallen off the ceiling and lay in ugly heaps throughout the kitchen. Everything metal was caked in a coral reef of rust and corrosion. Parts of the hardwood floor had fallen through into the basement below, leaving ominous dark gaps leading to who knew what chthonic depths far below. With trembling hands, Chuck reached down and picked up the diary once again.

_I kissed Chuck today. It would have been good but someone saw. Why does it always have to happen this way? Chuck's parents and mine grounded us both and we're not allowed to see each other after school anymore. In fact we're not even supposed to talk or pass notes but I'll try to sneak him a note tomorrow in line for food._

_September 30_

_ It's all happening all over again Diary._

_ Jerry called me a faggot and punched me in the stomach when I was trying to use the bathroom. I guess I can only go between classes now when there's not going to be anybody else to bother me. Lucas tripped me right in front of Mr. Lewis, a 5__th__ grade teacher, and Mr. Lewis just pretended he didn't see anything. Of course it took less than a day for the whole school to know about what we did and now everyone is gossiping about us. The girls all glare, the boys push and shove and name-call, and the teachers don't do anything about even when they see it. I know there's no point going to the principal. This is just like my last school all over again._

_ I did manage to slip a note into Chuck's back pocket without anyone seeing. I hope he gets back to me._

_October 1_

_ Chuck gave me a note back. We're going to secretly meet at the abandoned shack after school today and make a plan._

_ The therapist said that I felt tense and gave me a back rub today. So gross. My parents don't seem to be listening when I tell them that I don't like him and he makes me feel uncomfortable. Of course he couldn't talk about anything else other than me and Chuck kissing. It's a small town and everybody talks with everybody so everybody knows about it. _

_ I don't get any peace anywhere._

_October 2_

_ We have a plan, Diary._

_ Our parents won't let us meet up and all the kids would tell their parents if we sat together at lunch. So we're going to join the little league team together and that'll give us a chance to talk without the entire school looking over us. Who knows – maybe if we play outfield together we can get close enough to talk once in awhile. We also set up a secret place where we can trade notes._

_ We'll go to our first practice session tomorrow._

And that was it. Chuck flipped through all the remaining pages of the diary, but they were empty. Whatever had happened, it had happened at the little league game. Wait, hadn't the colors of their uniform been the same colors he saw in Melissa's dead brother's room? Didn't that mean –

The blue and red uniforms. It was all rushing back into Chuck's brain at once. All those years of therapy, all the sessions with hypnotists and all psychotropic drugs his psychiatrists had put him on to make him forget. It was all unraveling now and the hideous truth was laid out beneath all the self-defensive scaffolding. It _had _happened at the little league game that day. He could remember everything now. The town had just covered the whole thing up; none of the boys involved ever talked and the investigators had given up on the case right away. It was just a little tragedy in a world that was overflowing with them and at least the victim had been a "sinner." _Good_. Chuck almost spat at the word.

It had happened after the game. Chuck's mom had left early to take care of a problem at the office, so she'd released him to walk home after practice on his own recognizance. It wasn't too far, only a couple miles, and Chuck knew a shortcut through the woods. He and Matt walked together. They'd been followed. The other boys waited until they were too far into the woods for anyone to hear them call for help. A vessel seemed to burst in his brain and a flashback begun to play in real time.

"Hey, look at the two little faggots!" Jerry crowed.

Chuck put his hands on his hips. "I'm _not_ a faggot."

"Then why are you walking with a faggot, you fag?" a boy whose name Chuck couldn't remember laughed.

"Just leave us _alone_," Matt cried hotly, the edges of his eyes stinging with tears.

"You know what they say about fags, right?" Jerry sneered. "The Bible says that fags go to Hell."

"That's right," interjected another.

"Fags is Satan's best friends. Well, I think it's time we crush the devil once and for all."

"W-wait," Chuck stammered, raising his hands and stepping back. "I'm not a fag! Honest!"

Jerry smirked and reached down for something off the ground. "Oh yeah? Prove it then."

"What do you want me to do?" Chuck asked with a quivering voice.

"Chuck, please! Don't!" Matt moaned, unheeded.

"Help us do what they say in Church," Jerry replied smugly. "Gays are to be stoned, right?"

Jerry's chief minion added, "That's right, brother."

"O-okay."

Chuck slowly stepped away from Matt and took his place next to Jerry.

"Chuck! Please don't let them do this!" Tears were streaming down Matt's face now.

Jerry was the first to throw a rock, and it hit Matt in the stomach, making him double over in pain. The other boys let out whoops and threw a few more smooth, weighted stones in Matt's direction. When they hit, they left livid bruises and sometimes broke the skin and made blood dribble down onto the boy's little league uniform. Jerry let out a sadistic cackle. One of the other boys – Carl – watched Chuck carefully. Feeling that he had no choice, Chuck reached down, picked up a small stone, and hurled it, trying desperately not to cry and give himself away. The projectile connected with a wet smack.

"Hey guys, watch this," Jerry snickered, picking up the biggest stone of the bunch.

Matt was on his knees now, and blood streamed down his face from a busted nose. His cheek was clouded with a fat, livid bruise, and blood pooled beneath his skin from ruptured vessels. Matt's eyes were bloodshot and vacant, and he didn't even raise his hands to resist when Jerry hurled the unusually large rock. It struck Matt's skull with a sickly thud. Matt's eyes rolled back in his head and he fell over.

Jerry spat on the ground and then sauntered over to where Matt lay bleeding. "Got anything to say for yourself, fag?"

There was no response.

"I _said_, got anything to _say for yourself_, fag?" Jerry demanded in a louder voice.

Carl walked over and looked down.

Matt didn't move.

Chuck turned and looked down at his feet.

"Oh shit. Jerry, I think he's _dead_," Carl breathed in a panic.

"What are you talking about?" Jerry sounded nervous. "We gave him a good beating, that's all. That's what faggots deserve, the Bible says so!"

"Jerry, he's not breathing!" Carl shouted.

"What? Fuck! No way!" Jerry wheeled around, looking all the other boys in the eyes.

"Oh shit. Oh shit. I think he's dead Jerry," Carl groaned, putting his head near Matt's lips to try to listen for breathing.

Jerry stared at each of the boys in turn. "This didn't happen! Nobody say a _word_ about this! If you say one word to your parents, or the cops, or anybody else, I swear I'll come to your house at night and slit your mother's throat! You all understand that? You _got that_, Chuck?"

Chuck looked up and nodded numbly.

Carl's legs were trembling. "Let's get out of here!"

Chuck didn't say a word about the incident when he got home, just that he didn't want to go to little league anymore. It took the police a full day to find Matt's body. Worse, the county medical examiner released a statement that included the fact that the boy would have lived had he gotten rapid medical attention at the scene. Chuck's heart had sank into the very bottom of his shoes and stayed there for many years. He made many excuses to pastors; to doctors; to psychiatrists, but never told anybody the truth about what happened that day after the little league game. Eventually, under the conditioning of well-meaning shrinks and youth pastors, he'd just… kind of… forgot. Every day it got easier and easier not to think of it and the drugs helped. Eventually he stopped thinking about it at all, and from there, it was just a short journey into not remembering, either.

Soft, sarcastic clapping pulled Chuck out of his flashback. He looked up with puffy red eyes to see the strange little girl had gotten into Melissa's house and was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, judging him. He shined the beam of his flashlight over in her direction and she didn't even blink.

She still had blue eyes; dark blue; the blue of the ocean on an overcast afternoon. Her hair was still short and curled at the bottom, reminding Chuck for all the world of what happened to his own hair when he allowed it to grow out too long. The girl was wearing a black Chinese qipao with gold trim that set off the color of her mussy auburn hair. She grinned at him without humor and stopped her disparaging applause.

"So, you finally learned the sad, sad truth about Matthew Davis and the friend who let him die," she announced, making him wince. "_Helped_ him die, some might argue."

"What do you want from me?" Chuck demanded wearily.

"You're not done yet. You learned about the young prince's best friend, who he murdered for witnessing his crime."

"What crime?" Chuck snarled. "There's nothing illegal about being gay."

"Just immoral?" the little girl countered with a grey laugh.

"What crime are you talking about?"

"The Queen's son and the Queen's daughter – the little Prince and the little Princess. He martyred her and then the Prince was forced to kill his friend to cover up his sin. No? Not ringing any bells yet?" the girl asked.

Chuck was physically and emotionally exhausted. "No."

"Meet me at the town church at midnight. I'll tell you the rest of what you want to know – _and_ help you escape this town."

"What makes you think I'll follow you?" Chuck asked coldly.

"Because it's the only way out."

The little girl laughed and slipped behind the doorframe. Chuck jumped from his chair and pursued her, but when he turned the corner she was just gone, as though she'd vanished into thin air.

He couldn't even hear her footsteps.

[AUTHOR:] I want to see some reviews, you reprobates. Don't make me hold the ending hostage. :-P


	5. The Church

Wiles was alone again, and things were rapidly taking a turn for the worse.

There was something… scratching… from within the wall next to his head. Fully half the kitchen floor was gone, now, and Chuck could only traverse by taking careful steps from beam to beam suspended over the uttermost blackness. The entire house was shaking, sending debris flying, and Chuck could hardly see due to long strands of reddish brown hair stabbing him in the eyeballs.

"One step… two steps…" Chuck whispered to himself, carefully stepping from support to support.

His flashlight rattled on the kitchen counter and each time the house shook, it came a little closer to clattering off the edge and into the abyss below. The sound of thundering water echoed upwards from the depths, and to fall would certainly mean a painful death, crushed against the boulders of a cataract. Chuck winced with distaste as he noticed that there were termites crawling everywhere. They were swarming out from under the kitchen baseboards; crawling all over the beams that formed a path across the collapsing kitchen; and even dropping down from the ceiling above him. He couldn't take a single step without crushing dozens of the vile insects under the bottoms of his boots. Termites even fell into his hair, but he was so busy just trying to keep his balance that he was helpless to do anything about it. Thousands of little termite wings fluttered on updrafts generated from somewhere far beneath what was left of the floor. Every step Chuck took was an exercise in revulsion. Finally, he got close enough to catch his flashlight just as it clattered off the countertop and started scything into the void.

Chuck immediately celebrated the little victory. "Gotcha!"

With the flashlight now fully in hand, the pastor scanned the kitchen from right to left. The house continued to shake on its foundation, even harder than before, and a sudden, resounding crack almost sent him sprawling to his knees. Plaster fell into his hair and turned to mud on his sweaty face. The place was coming apart. He had no choice. He had to escape the house before the entire building rattled itself into the hungry oblivion below.

Traversing the kitchen the other way, back towards the exit, was even worse than the trip to retrieve his flashlight. Clouds of asbestos billowed every time another chunk of ceiling fell and Chuck could barely breathe in the choking, miserable dust. Formerly sturdy crossbeams now barely held his weight, and he had to jump from one to the next without looking either backwards or down. The floor suddenly gave way beneath Melissa's fridge, and it plummeted into the depths below with a deafening crash. It took a long time before Chuck heard the splash where it fell into icy water somewhere down in the unplumbable depths. He shuddered and made his next jump just before the beam he'd been standing on cracked in half and followed it downward.

It almost didn't register when he finally made it out through the door and onto solid ground. He stood in a puzzled stupor for a moment before falling to his knees in thanksgiving.

"Oh, God. Thank you God. I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care what anybody says, I know about my sins, and I know you saved me and you must have saved me for a reason…" Chuck helplessly blubbered.

With one final, sickening crash, the ground beneath Melissa's house gave way and the entire building disappeared down into the sucking abyss. Chuck watched in mute horror as the last of her scattered belongings bounced around and went in after it. By God's mercy, the earthquake finally slowed to a stop, leaving Chuck breathless and alone with only the sound of roaring water to keep him company. For a long time, he just sat on the ground and panted. He might have been there for only a few minutes.

He might have been there for days.

Finally, he roused himself from his daze. The girl said that the only way out was through the church, and frankly, Chuck didn't have any better ideas. Intuitively he knew that trying to just walk out of town would be pointless; he'd always run into a broken bridge or insurmountable cliff or maybe he'd just find himself turned around in the woods over and over again. Chuck checked his gun, hefted his flashlight, and headed down the highway back towards the town.

It was hard to put his finger on, exactly, but something was definitely wrong. A faint ruddy light licked the bottom of the clouds and provided the only illumination he'd seen from the sky in hours and hours. The road was in even worse condition than before, and occasionally the asphalt was broken up by enormous sinkholes that forced him to carefully tiptoe around the edges to proceed. Strange noises came out of the thick, blighted woods, and more than once a wail of otherworldly agony sent him down to his knees desperately trying to protect his ears. On one occasion he could swear that he heard a buzzsaw chewing its way through screaming flesh but the sound vanished just as quickly as it began. Every step made him feel heavier, as if gravity itself were working against him and steadily pulling him down deeper and deeper towards the center of the Earth.

But it was when the church was finally in sight that Chuck found himself almost fully giving into despair. First, what had once been an orderly if small Baptist church was now something hideously Other. Minarets topped with spikes thrust upwards from the church at bizarre angles, and onion domes reminiscent of the Kremlin were painted in garish colors and lit by disorienting blue spotlights. Rusty water – or was it blood? – dripped down the sides of the building at irregular intervals. Huge amounts of smoke were rising up from the graveyard at the back, and ashes drifted down from the sky and dirtied his already filthy hair and clothes. But that wasn't the worst of it. The architecture, as ghastly as it was, was only an afterthought compared to what was on the ground.

The colossal steel doors of the church were guarded by hundreds of milling, vile creatures. Hundreds of clones of dead Matthew fought and jostled one another, writhing like insects. They were all wearing the same bloodied little league uniform. But each was also unique in its own individually awful way. Each bore a disfigurement or mutation that was all its own. Some had bulging eyes, others distended posteriors or misshapen legs. Their flesh was rotten and bruised with pools of fetid blood, and Chuck wasn't sure if it was his imagination or if he could really smell their rotting bodies all the way from down the boulevard. Though most of the creatures were too busy fighting or fucking one another to pay him any mind, Chuck couldn't imagine how he'd make it through the teeming mass of quasi-living flesh. One of the creatures saw him and let out a terrifying screech, and a few of them answered his cry with one of their own before advancing on him, murder in their eyes.

Chuck let out a shout and raised his rifle. It barked time and time again as he sent projectiles of hot lead flying down the broken road, making several of the creatures stumble or fall twitching to the ground. Soon the gun clicked on an empty chamber, and Chuck reloaded it as fast as he could with uncontrollably shaking hands. Closer and closer they closed the distance, and the pastor alternated between firing a few shots at a time and desperately feeding small caliber ammunition down into the rifle's tube.

He was still reloading when the nearest creature leapt farther than Chuck could have imagined possible. He raised the barrel of the gun just in time to parry a swipe from the Thing's venomous claws, but the weight of the creature bore into him and sent him sprawling backwards into the ground. He didn't even have a chance to brace his fall, so when he hit the pavement the blow knocked the wind clean out of him. The Thing slashed at him a second time just as its buddies caught up to him. A blossom of unimaginable pain shot up his spine just as he heard something crunch near his feet, and Chuck closed his eyes and waited to die, helpless to resist the weight pinning him to the asphalt. His soul was in God's hands now, and all he could do was pray that God's judgments would be wiser and more merciful than those of mankind.

"Now, we can't have you dying just yet," an accented female voice suddenly interjected.

There was a loud, wet thump, and Chuck shut his eyes even more tightly, expecting the worst. But the weight on his chest suddenly lessened and after a moment's hesitation he slowly opened his eyes. It was Melissa, and she was laying into another one of the creatures with a tire iron. Droplets of blood sprayed everywhere and wetted his shirt and face. Chuck tried to wipe his face clean with his filthy sleeve, but somehow all me managed to accomplish was to make them both even dirtier.

Melissa's voice was concerned. "Chuck, can you stand?"

"I… I think so."

With Melissa's help, Chuck slowly hauled himself to his feet. His right foot was clearly broken and gnawed; putting the slightest amount of weight on it filled him with agony. Apart from that, it seemed like he'd live. A few more of the Creatures were shambling their way over.

"Hey, go get that pipe to use as a cane," Melissa said, motioning to something she'd seen off to the side. "I'll hold them off for you."

Melissa charged the Things with gusto while Chuck slowly and haltingly made his way over to the pipe. Somehow it was the perfect size to fit under his arm, but it was an awkward struggle to haul himself up while trying to keep a grip on the flashlight and rifle as well. When he finally got back to his feet he saw Melissa ruthlessly hammering away with the tire iron and he felt a little chastened by her fearlessness.

But even as he struggled to reload the rifle while still remaining upright, things started to go south for Melissa. More and more of the creatures took notice of the fighting and put aside their mutual differences for long enough to shuffle over towards the new threat. The tire iron rose and fell over and over and over again, but there were just so many of the creatures that two more would replace every one that she finally pummeled into the bloody dirt. Chuck let out a loud cry and fired a few more shots in the direction of the oncoming foes, but he only managed to drop one or two and they were rapidly replaced by a greater number of their fellows, yellow teeth gleaming in the beam of Chuck's flashlight. He could only watch helplessly as she was swarmed and finally borne backwards, and wet, crunching sounds accompanied Melissa's screams of pain.

"Melissa!" he cried helplessly, hobbling towards her but moving too slowly to catch them.

"Chuck!" Melissa's rasping shout was stained red with agony. "Close your eyes and get ready to run!"

"What?!"

She'd saved him once before and he could only trust that she'd be able to save them both this time. Chuck quickly squeezed his eyes shut just before the brightest flash filled the space behind his eyelids, nearly blinding him despite the fact his eyes were shut tight. The flash was bright enough to deafen; it was like walking face first into a brick wall made of photons. There was a loud cry of dismay from the creatures, but when Chuck was able to reopen his eyes, Melissa was gone.

However she'd caused the flash, the Creatures were left disoriented and blind. Chuck hobbled as quickly as he could towards the doors to the church, and though a few of the Things swiped at him, none of them were able to find him in the dazzle left in the aftermath of the indescribable light. To Chuck's amazement, the gigantic metal doors of the church opened with nothing more than a touch by his fingers. He quickly scurried inside, and they slammed shut behind him as soon as he was within the walls of the strange church.

Compared to the monstrous architecture, the inside of the cathedral was surprisingly sedate. It looked like the inside of a church anywhere, with rows of pews leading to a raised dais in the back where the priest gave his sermons. There were a few of the Creatures inside, but they were listening attentively to the sermon being delivered from the pulpit and they paid Chuck no mind as he slowly made his way forward. To Chuck's surprise, the homily was being delivered by none other than the little girl, this time wearing full papal vestment five sizes too big for her and speaking in an earnest tone. The whole thing might have seemed like a sacrilegious joke except that her voice was carrying such authority.

"Wise men of old gave the soul a feminine name. Indeed she is female in her nature as well. She even has her womb.

As long as she was with the father, she was a virgin and in form androgynous. But when she fell down into a body and came to this life, then she fell into the hands of many robbers. And the wanton creatures passed her from one to another and abused her. Some made use of her by force, while others did so by seducing her with a gift. In short, they defiled her, and she was removed from her virginity.

And in her body she prostituted herself and gave herself to one and all, considering each one she was about to embrace her husband. When she had given herself to wanton, unfaithful adulterers, so that they might make use of her, she sighed deeply and repented. But even when she turns her face from those adulterers, she runs to others and they compel her to live with them and render service to them upon her bed, as if they were her masters. Out of shame she no longer dares to leave them, whereas they deceive her for a long time, pretending to be faithful, true husbands, as if they greatly respected her. And after all this they abandon her and go.

She then becomes a poor desolate widow, without help; not even a measure of food was left from the time of her affliction. For from them she gained nothing except the defilements they gave her when they had sexual intercourse with her. And her offspring by the adulterers are dumb, blind, and sickly. They are feebleminded.

What does that mean to you?"

Chuck was startled out of his reverie by the sudden question. He looked around, hesitant, hoping against hope that the question was being asked of someone else. All the Creatures in the church turned to him expectantly, and he cleared his throat several times, trying to find his bearings.

The little girl just waited, patient and without judgment, as though she were a goddess from outside the spheres that govern time. Chuck finally forced out an answer.

"It means you want me to give up!" he cried. "It means you want me to defile myself, and to willingly enter into a life of sin. Isn't that what you described just now? Aren't you the…" Chuck hesitated over saying the word in front of a little girl. "…Aren't you the adulterer referenced in whatever blasphemous testament you just read from?"

She cocked her head, neither offended nor afraid. "I think you have it backwards."

"What do you mean?" Chuck demanded angrily.

"Why, silly, isn't it obvious by now? _I'm_ your soul."

"What!?" Chuck spat. "That's impossible!"

She closed her eyes and chanted, reciting text she clearly knew by heart.

"I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.

Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.

Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,

and you will find me in those that are to come.

And do not look upon me in the dung-heap,

nor go and leave me cast out,

and you will find me in the kingdoms.

And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those

Are disgraced and in the least places,

Nor laugh at me.

And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.

But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.

Be on your guard!"

Then the little girl vanished into thin air, right in front of Chuck's gawking eyes. Before he could recover his wits, a soft, feminine voice spoke up from behind his right shoulder.

"You should listen to her," Melissa whispered.

Chuck spun to confront her, his right foot blazing with agony all the while. But Melissa disappeared before he could even catch sight of her, and just as quickly, the little girl reappeared on the dais overlooking the sanctuary.

"That's right," she said. "I control the horizontal. I control the vertical. All this is my doing, and you – you're in my world and it is by my grace that you take every breath. I am _your own soul_, and now, I want a turn to speak with my own words."

"Don't be ridiculous!" Chuck said, backing up into a pew and almost falling over. "How can you be my soul? _I'm_ my soul!"

The church vanished. Suddenly and inexplicably Chuck found himself at his tenth year birthday party. It was exactly as he remembered it – no, that was all wrong. Memories are stories, factual fictions we concoct in order to catalogue the raw content of experience; we concatenate the tastes and the smells and the sights of our experiences into mere words that we can write down and share with others. This was far more real than a memory, just as real as if he'd been transported back through time to stand as a ghost at his own birthday party. He even saw himself, the little boy that he'd been just before being touched by the blight of sin, burying his face into his mother's thigh over some imagined childhood slight.

In an instant he was experiencing another vision from his past. He saw himself in seventh grade at his therapist's office. The air was musty and smelled like a grandparent's house, and dim yellow light streamed through a half-open window, casting garish shadows across the mottled brown carpeting. Chuck was glaring silently at the psychiatrist, as though daring him the other man to be the first to speak. Instead, the shrink just wrote in rapid shorthand, recording things the younger Chuck could neither see nor understand. Then and now, he felt entirely alienated.

Another scene. Staying behind to scour the Bible, reviewing the English and the Koine side by side. Taking note of the similarities and rationalizing differences, treading a careful line between reading the text that was written and interpreting it through the lenses he'd been taught to use by his youth pastors and his theology professors. Of course, _this_ really meant _that_. _This_ was meant to be taken literally and _that_ was a parable. _This_ word had to be treated very gingerly, because you could easily stumble into ignominious heresy by welcoming it with an overly liberal interpretation. His roommate once again came home drunk, and Chuck glared and continued to parse the text until the night grew terribly old.

Graduation. Meeting Carmen. Their short, stilted courtship. Their marriage. Chuck's acceptance as pastor in his rural church. Carmen's cold eyes. Occasional acts of mechanical, pleasureless sex. The noisy arguments and the unforgiving silences. All of it passed by in a flash, so quickly that Chuck almost couldn't recognize them as scenes from his own life, but with such intensity that it was impossible to deny it. When he found himself back in the church, with the little girl standing behind the lectern with a stern scowl, he almost fell to his knees from the shock of it all.

"What do you _want_ from me?" Chuck groaned in misery.

"I want what you have denied me for day after day, week after week, month after month, year after lonely year," the girl replied. "I want you to accept Me for who I am. Us for who We are. Yourself for who You are."

Chucks eyes were filling with tears.

He said, "I've lived my _whole life_ for God. And you're telling me that after all this time, I just have to give up on it? To throw it all away and go live life as an atheist with no morals and no restraint, just doing whatever my worst instincts demand from me at any given time?"

"No – I want you to live the way you want to. With honesty. With compassion. With grace. With all those virtues you taught easily from the pulpit but never were able to show yourself," the girl countered.

"But God-"

"But God _what_?" she retorted. "Who's out there saying all these things about God? Pastors and theologians, writers and scholars and laymen. Pharisees who quote scripture non-stop, just like they did in Jesus' time and just like they do today. You can make the scriptures say anything you want if you pick what you out want to hear and twist it to do your bidding. The Bible was written and interpreted by men! Wise men, godly men, inspired men, but imperfect and fallible _men_. And you've martyred yourself almost every day of your life because you looked to men for guidance instead of the Kingdom engraved upon your heart."

"Take up your cross and follow me," Chuck responded.

"So what? It's easy to always have an answer; just because you have a reply doesn't mean that you're right. The Pharisees always had answers, too! They were always so certain of their own impeccable righteousness. They had all the answers in the world but because their hearts were full of malice it credited them nothing in the end. You can go on the rest of your life following the words of men, or you can change your heart and follow the real scriptures, which you'd still have with you shipwrecked naked and alone on a desert island!"

It would be too much, perhaps, to say that the scales immediately fell from Chuck's eyes. But something about the girl's guileless zeal spoke to something deep inside of him. She was right – it didn't matter how perfectly he could quote scripture or how well he knew the liturgies; the truth was, if he couldn't be honest with himself first how could he ever hope to be honest with God? He bowed his head in exhaustion and shame. The girl came up and lifted his chin with her finger. He was astonished to find himself face to face with Melissa again.

"I don't understand…" Chuck whispered.

"That's okay. God's grace is truly limitless."

"What's your name?"

Melissa cocked her head and laughed. "It's probably too much of a cliché to say that I have many names. 'I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin.' Why don't you just keep calling me Melissa instead?"

"Okay… Melissa." Chuck sighed. "Now what?"

"Want to dance?"

Now it was Chuck's turn to laugh. "Dance? My foot's smashed up; I'm covered in blood and gore; and I can barely stay upright. You want to _dance_?"

"Yep."

The scene around them shifted, and they were no longer in the abominable cathedral. Instead, Chuck found himself in the Versailles, and a band played waltzes while couples danced around and even through them. Everyone was wearing some kind of elaborate mask except for Melissa, and when Chuck reached up to touch his face he found that it was naked, as well. Melissa was wearing a gorgeous gown of the purest white, but though Chuck was embarrassed to find he was still blood-soaked and wounded, she didn't hesitate to take him into her arms.

"Hey, be careful," Chuck protested as she started to lead him across the floor. "I can barely stand."

"I'll be gentle."

The two danced together awkwardly, unnoticed by any of the ephemeral phantoms who waltzed with the music alongside them. Chuck stumbled many times to mutual laughter. It was hard to say how long they danced through the tableau, but when Chuck finally called a halt he felt better than he had in years.

"Okay, okay," he panted. "How am I supposed to keep up with you?"

"I'm sure you'll find a way," she promised.

"I don't… I don't really know what to do."

Melissa blew an errant strand of hair out of her face. "If you're honest with yourself, I think you'll do okay. Remember, I'll always be with you, and God will be too. Think of it as a second honeymoon. This is your chance to discover God all over again. Become like a child."

With a sudden flash of light, even brighter than before, Melissa vanished along with the imaginal Versailles. This time the intensity of the light didn't hurt his eyes. In fact, Chuck felt altogether refreshed. When he could finally see again, he found himself in the dusty sanctuary of a small Baptist church in an abandoned town in Buttfuck Egypt, West Virginia. Chuck almost didn't trust the floor, and when he took his first step he was dismayed to discover that whatever else had happened to him, the injury in his foot was still undeniably real. He let himself out of the building, and made his slow, careful, aching way back to his car. It took hours and by the time he arrived he was so parched with thirst that he guzzled his entire emergency water supply.

When Chuck tentatively turned his key in the ignition, the car's engine roared to life without a hint of protest. None of the warning lights came on. Somewhere between bemusement and utter, mind-bending confusion, Chuck slowly started up the shattered highway and back towards civilization.

[AUTHOR:] To be concluded next time!


	6. The Ascent

When Pastor Wiles arrived home, his wife Carmen was waiting for him with cold eyes and completed divorce paperwork.

"Sign here," she announced without any kind of ceremony whatsoever, thrusting a clipboard and a pen into his hands before he could open his mouth to speak.

Chuck shook his head and got to work. It took him over two hours to read, sign, and initial everything. Though obviously their divorce wouldn't be final for weeks while the documents wormed their way through the creaking court system, he immediately felt a sense of finality – and relief. The next thing he did was ring the Maple Community Baptist Church and resign his pastorship, effective immediately. His secretary sputtered first in surprise and then chastisement, but her pleas to at least give two weeks' notice fell on deaf ears.

_Let those people solve their problems for themselves_, he reasoned.

Not long after that, Chuck threw all his earthly possessions into the Jetta and headed out onto the highway. He took as little as possible, giving his wife nothing worth fighting for during their impending court date. He drove long into the night and then into the next morning, unsure of where he might go; he could only rely on his meager savings and equally meager credit limit to cushion his fall for as long as possible. He drove for days, emotionally and mentally unmoored. Without meaning to, he found himself winding up the meandering California coast, north through Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, until he finally rolled to a stop in San Francisco. He stared upwards at the gleaming towers of downtown. To the tradition he'd always believed in, San Francisco always represented a life of sin and debauchery, and now here he was - trying to find himself like countless souls who'd walked the same path now stretching out before him. He took a deep breath of the cool, foggy summer air. Home.

For months he threw himself into every kind of defilement he could imagine. He sold his body for money. He went to raves and swallowed anything he was offered, resulting in nights of sweat and heat and chaos that left him quaking and exhausted when he finally returned to consciousness the next afternoon. He took poppers and MDMA; cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Chuck even fucked a couple of women, but found the experience no more satisfying than sex with his wife had been. Finally, he met a guy.

"You look like shit," a man observed in the bathroom of a gay bar where Chuck had managed to wrangle a job washing dishes for cash under the table.

"Who cares?" Chuck snarled in response.

The other man kept pissing. "Well, there must be somebody who loves you out there somewhere, right?"

"My parents are dead, I don't have any siblings, and my wife divorced me," Chuck answered with a snort. "Who does that leave?"

The other man zipped up. "Well, that should still leave God even if no one else."

"I already gave up on all that."

"Maybe you shouldn't have. Here." The man handed Chuck a card for a small, non-denominational church. "Why don't you come to services with me this Sunday? I don't know what happened in your past, but it sounds like you got a bad deal somewhere along the line."

"Is this a date?" Chuck asked sarcastically.

"It could be, if you want it to."

"And what would the church think about that?"

The guy shrugged. "I don't see why it would bother them at all."

Ultimately, Chuck went. The other man's name was Matthew, which added an extra sting to the entire experience. But he was gracious, funny, and kind – everything the Matthew from his childhood might have grown up to be. The pair dated. They grew closer. Matthew worked as a real estate agent, and Chuck was lucky enough to land a full time position at a bank. The pair dated some more, and, after much deliberation, moved in together. All the while Chuck volunteered at the little non-denominational church, taking on extra responsibilities, pastoring to the sick and elderly. Before he knew it, Chuck was a deacon and an odds-on favorite to become the next pastor of the church when the current pastor retired. He could hardly believe it. Everyone knew he was gay and they just didn't care. It really was possible for him to lead a normal life.

One cold, foggy day, the pair were married. None of Chuck's family showed but he'd made his peace. It can't be said that Chuck and Matthew went on to have a perfect life. Jobs were lost, cars were totaled, and more than one screaming match was had. But Chuck vastly preferred Matthew's fire to his ex-wife's Arctic chill, and while it can't be said that their life went on to be perfect, it can be said that they fought, argued, lived, and loved right into a comfortable old age.

Chuck never found the town of Sykes, West Virginia in any map or atlas. Google Earth proved useless – the area was too forested to really tell if there were any more secrets hiding beneath the canopy.

**End**


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